“Knowledge is king,” as the adage says, is increasingly become more germane to our exponentially expanding information-based society. Perfect knowledge is the ideal that participants seek to assist in decision making and for determining preferences, affinities, and dislikes. Practically, perfect knowledge about a given topic is virtually impossible to obtain unless the inquirer is the source of all of information about such topic (e.g., autobiographer). Armed with more information, decision makers are generally best positioned to select a choice that will lead to a desired outcome/result (e.g., which restaurant to go to for dinner). However, as more information is becoming readily available through various electronic communications modalities (e.g., the Internet), one is left to sift through what is amounting to a myriad of data to obtain relevant and, more importantly, trust worthy information to assist in decision making activities. Although there are various tools (e.g., search engines, community boards with various ratings), there lacks any indicia of personal trustworthiness (e.g., measure of the source's reputation) with located data.
Currently a person seeking to locate information to assist in a decision, to determine an affinity, and/or identify a dislike can leverage traditional non-electronic data sources (e.g., personal recommendations—which can be few and can be biased) and/or electronic data sources such as web sites, bulletin boards, blogs, etc. to locate (sometimes rated) data about a particular topic/subject (e.g., where to stay when visiting San Francisco). Such practice can be time consuming and can be unreliable as with most of the electronic data there lacks an indicia of trustworthiness of the source of the information. Failing to find a plethora (or spot on) information from immediate non-electronic and/or electronic data source, the person making the inquiry is left to make the decision using limited information which can lead to less than perfect predictions of outcomes, results, and can lead to low levels of satisfaction undertaking one or more activities for which information was sought.
Current practices also do not leverage trustworthiness of information or, stated differently, attribute a value to the reputation of the source of data (e.g., referral). With current practices, the entity seeking the data must make a value judgment on the reputation of the data source. Such value judgment is generally based on previous experiences with the data source (e.g., rely on Mike's restaurant recommendations since he is a chef and Laura's hotel recommendations in Europe since she lived and worked in Europe for 5 years). Unless the person making the inquiry has an extensive network of references from which to rely to obtain desired data needed to make a decision, most often, the person making the decision is left to take a risk or “roll the dice” based on best available non-attributed (non-reputed) data. Such prospect can lead some participants from not engaging in a contemplated activity.
From the foregoing, it is appreciated that there exists a need for systems and methods that are aimed to ameliorate the shortcomings of existing practices.